A Greek fusion menu, flowing cocktails, and a miniature gallery of hand-sculpted animate fauna and flora: everything comes together seamlessly at Cairo Food Week’s dinner at Mazeej. Chef Adam Kodovas, the Greek-Egyptian chef famous for Ex Machina’s Greek-fusion clarity and who’s already part of the Gn'K family, ran the meal like it was second nature, with the ease of someone in the kitchen of their home.We began with warm bread and smoked butter that did more than fill time; the smoke acted as punctuation. The first real note came as sashimi, lightly aged so the texture sat between velvet and bite, accented by sharp pickles, toasted almonds and a glossy EXM sauce that threaded them together. A tartlet arrived next, its eggplant folded into miso and shards of aged cheese atop delicate Egyptian feteer.

Every dish served by Kodovas seemed to communicate a message of shared heritage, with particular emphasis on the act of sharing food. “The culinary history of the world is too intertwined for us to say that this dish belongs to this country and this dish belongs there,” Kodovas tells SceneEats, “I’m not interested in ownership fights about the origins of food. Greece and Egypt have a lot in common, and I use that as a strength.” Then came the octo-taco: a corn tortilla cupping smoked octopus, tomato and a bracing lash of pickled red onion. It was geometry and memory at once—the tortilla’s comfort framing ocean smoke and sharpness—so that a single bite could flip from nostalgia to invention. The smoke returned here as a recurring motif, not a novelty but a connective tissue.Dessert landed with the same compositional economy: white chocolate partnered with roasted apples, a scoop of vanilla ice cream and a scatter of EXM granola. The sweetness felt engineered to soothe, the apple’s roast adding tannic depth, the granola a final textural wink. It was a tidy landing that held the evening’s composure in place.
All night, Le Lab’s installation played at the edge of each dish - a reference point we looked to for a complete picture of the evening. The miniature forest of vegetable characters and small beasts made the food feel like part of a larger fable. The sculptures didn’t illustrate the dishes; they animated their vegetal undertones, turning simple leaves and roots into personalities that nudged the palate’s reading of each course. “Food is art,” Kareem Nabil of Gn’K tells SceneEats, “Tonight, both food and art come together to create a full sensory experience in the form of a single dinner.” The collaboration of edible versus inedible art pushed the dinner toward a theatrical modesty where visual whimsy and culinary precision held equal weight.

Kodovas trusts small questions: what happens when octopus meets smoke, when feteer meets miso, when my heritage meets yours? He then answers them through technique and measured restraint. Ex Machina’s Aegean echoes appeared as seasoning choices and acidities, while an Egyptian backing felt like the quiet infrastructure of provenance that let the menu breathe. Guests left with tactile memories: textures composed with care and the echo of a rooftop night where art and cooking kept each other honest.